Army National Guard, a disproportionately rural force, is sending more soldiers to Iraq

"While the military as a whole is ramping down its presence in Iraq, its most politically sensitive component — the citizen-soldiers of the Army National Guard — is ramping up from 46,000 to 55,000 troops," reports the National Journal. And a graphic with the story illustrates that the Guard comes mainly from rural areas.

"Since its origins in the colonial militias of the 1600s, the Army National Guard has drawn most of its soldiers from small towns," the magazine says. "People living in highly urbanized states are generally less likely to enlist; those in rural areas, more likely."

Reporter Sydney Freedberg Jr. writes, "An Army National Guard unit recruits from its local community and may keep the same soldiers together for decades. That those communities keep producing volunteers six years into a global war speaks to the depth of their military traditions. ... Such ties are strongest in small towns -- not in more-rural areas, where people live too far apart to converge easily at a local armory, and not in large cities, with their abundance of social and economic alternatives."

"In some communities, the local Guard unit is one of the major sources of social cohesion," David Segal, University of Maryland sociology professor and the director of the school's Center for Research on Military Organization, told National Journal. "Being in the Guard is how one earns one's bona fides as a member of the community."

"But precisely because those bonds are so tight, the Guard does not provide the same social mobility that the regular military does," Freedberg writes. "All of these factors mean that the Army Guard has about half the percentage of African-Americans as the regular Army, significantly fewer Hispanics, and a lower ratio of women to men. As a rule of thumb, the lower a state's population density and the lower its percentage of minorities, the higher the percentage of its population likely to be serving in the Army National Guard. As a rule of thumb, the lower a state's population density and the lower its percentage of minorities, the higher the percentage of its population likely to be serving in the Army National Guard." (Read more)